EVENTS

Life is coarse grained, research is fine grained

In a celebrated remark in the case Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964) involving “hard core pornography”, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said that “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”

I am becoming convinced that this is a general feature of life. Questions have simple answers only when we don’t examine them too closely. Suppose, for example, I asked the question “What is the length of my desk?” you would expect that there is a definite length to it and that there should be a straightforward way to get the answer.

At the simplest level, you could take a ruler and measure it and call this the length. But is that the most accurate measurement? A ruler is, after all, a pretty coarse measuring instrument. You could get fancier and use more sophisticated devices such as laser beams and high precision timers to get increasing levels of precision. But at some point you reach a limit to precision because at a fundamental level, because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the length of the desk is not a well-defined quantity. This is because although the desk looks like an object with sharp boundaries, when you get to the sub-atomic level, we know that the atoms on the surface are quantum mechanical systems and so the edges of the desk are not sharply defined but instead are fuzzy and a blur. How do you measure the length of a blur?

At the large scales with which we normally work, we can ignore this and think of the desk as having a definite length but that is because we are not looking too closely.

For another example, although we all have a general intuitive idea about what is science and non-science, I have previously discussed how, when you look closely at the question, it is hard it is to strictly demarcate science from non-science. This is because the problem of finding necessary and sufficient conditions that demarcate one class of objects from another class of objects is very hard, and perhaps impossible.

While in everyday life we tend to be coarse-grained in our outlook, universities tend to be places where things are examined in fine-grained detail This is partly the reason why universities have received the label of “ivory towers.” To those outside the university it can seem like academics are engaged in research at a level of detail that seems pointless and the ‘ivory tower’ label is sometimes intended as an insult. But the reality is that universities are one of the few places where people try to examine things closely, to see how far we can go in defining things before we reach the limits at which things break down. While to outsiders this may seem like nitpicking, it is important to do this because the consequences of such fine-grained analyses can have practical consequences.

For example, most people have a clear idea of (say) what is alive and what is dead, of what is human and what is not. But those classifications are not as clear-cut as they can seem. What is considered dead for example, has changed over time, from ‘heart dead’ to ‘brain dead’ to ‘persistent vegetative state.’ Knowing the precise limits of knowledge in this area has important practical consequences. (See part 1, part 2, and part 3 of that series.)

It seems to be the case that as much as we might like to have certainty, we can never have it. At some point, we reach a level of detail where we have to make a decision, a judgment, as to what something is and what we need to do. This is why we often delegate to people (judges, doctors, academics, and other experts in each field) who have studied these things the right to make such judgments on our behalf. It is not that they are infallible and cannot be wrong, but because at least they work with an awareness of the limits of knowledge and of the ambiguities that exist at the fine-grained level.

Comments

Something that has always puzzled me: isn’t every thing science? I know this question may reveal ignorance. But what is the true definition of science anyway? Is it narrowed to only that which can be currently measured physically with the technology of the day.
Since the advent of quantum physics, this notion seems a bit outdated. For how can we even define physical now – or even find the demarkation of the measuring tool to that which is being measured – where’s the boundary?
I think science should be defined more broadly: as the medium used to understand the nature of our universe, from the micro-subatomic to the macro-cosmic. It’s like a net in the ocean. Science is the ocean, not the net that keeps widening as advancement progresses.
Although I agree that academia plays a valuable role in “widening the net”, I think there is a major flaw in their execution to reveal this “fine-grain detail”, which is usually performed in the isolation of the whole, which distorts results considerably.

There has been a long, and to date fruitless, search for a precise definition of science that is workable. While there seem to be a few necessary conditions that can be proposed, that seems to be the limit.

Great piece of work. but what still confuse me how would one ditinguise between life and dead at the sub atomic level? its rather strange that electrons still remains at motion…then can we say that there isno dead?????????